So You've Been Publicly Shamed

by Jon Ronson

Hardcover, 2015

Status

Available

Call number

152.4

Genres

Collection

Your library

Publication

Riverhead Books (2015), Edition: F First Edition, 304 pages

Description

"From the internationally bestselling author of The Psychopath Test, a captivating and brilliant exploration of one of our world's most overlooked forces. For the past three years, Jon Ronson has been immersing himself in the world of modern-day public shaming-meeting famous shamees, shamers, and bystanders who have been impacted. This is the perfect time for a modern-day Scarlet Letter-a radically empathetic book about public shaming, and about shaming as a form of social control. It has become such a big part of our lives it has begun to feel weird and empty when there isn't anyone to be furious about. Whole careers are being ruined by one mistake. A transgression is revealed. Our collective outrage at it has the force of a hurricane. Then we all quickly forget about it and move on to the next one, and it doesn't cross our minds to wonder if the shamed person is okay or in ruins. What's it doing to them? What's it doing to us? Ronson's book is a powerful, funny, unique, and very humane dispatch from the frontline, in the escalating war on human nature and its flaws"-- "For the past three years, Jon Ronson has been immersing himself in the world of modern-day public shaming--meeting famous shamees, shamers, and bystanders who have been impacted. This is the perfect time for a modern-day Scarlet Letter--a radically empathetic book about public shaming, and about shaming as a form of social control. It has become such a big part of our lives it has begun to feel weird and empty when there isn't anyone to be furious about. Whole careers are being ruined by one mistake. A transgression is revealed. Our collective outrage at it has the force of a hurricane. Then we all quickly forget about it and move on to the next one, and it doesn't cross our minds to wonder if the shamed person is okay or in ruins. What's it doing to them? What's it doing to us?"--… (more)

Media reviews

New York Times

"[T]he choice of subject for “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed” turns out to be gutsy and smart. Without losing any of the clever agility that makes his books so winning, he has taken on truly consequential material and risen to the challenge."

— 1 more

The Guardian

This terrifying study of social media fury is another superb product from brand Ronson, humorous journalist and moralist par excellence

User reviews

LibraryThing member anna_in_pdx

Jon Ronson's writing style is very breezy, internetty and journalistic, so the book is a very quick and easy read. But the process of delving into shame and how it works, both on and off the internet, was gradual and built of insights that came at regular intervals that were later expanded upon or

disproven by other insights. I really loved this procedural way of writing about this nonfiction topic. It made the book read like a murder mystery.

I also am deeply interested in the topic. The Internet and its various social centers, including LibraryThing, are extremely important to me and the relationships I have online have enriched my life. At the same time, the way the Internet influences our lives is in many ways uncharted territory and I hav watched (usually not participated in) many Internet scandals of the day, in fact more than one of the ones covered in the book were things I remember. And it is scary how much our online persona can take over our actual life, or become redefined by a single post we made that came off wrong or somehow attracted mass attention.

The conclusion of the book is that we should try not to contribute to Internet shaming, particularly the kinds of pile ons that happen to non public figure individuals who are often quite young and used to not having much of a filter. But the book also showed me some ways in which we can have a little bit of control over our online lives by curating our behavior on line with more thought and deliberation.

I would recommend this book to most people I know, especially those of us for whom online socializing is important. I am a little bit of a snob when it comes to nonfiction and usually find this book's style to be too simple and confessional and just not my thing. But this book was a huge exception to that general rule. It was a journey for the author, and for me as well.

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LibraryThing member karieh

I found this book to be just fascinating. The title is certainly intriguing, but it was also a rare book that actually made me change my opinions on an issue. And THAT doesn't happen very often. I also think in the research and writing of this book, author Jon Ronson had a similar experience.

One of

his first quick examples involves an LA Fitness that was shamed on social media because they wouldn't cancel the membership of a couple who had lost their jobs and couldn't afford the fees. The result of that was that LA Fitness backed down - a story that makes one believe in the "power of the people".

"Something of real consequence was happening. We were at the start of a great renaissance of public shaming. After a lull of almost 180 years (public punishments were phased out in 1837 in the United Kingdom and in 1839 in the United States), it was back in a big way. When we deployed shame, we were utilizing an immensely powerful tool. It was coercive, borderless, and increasing in speed and influence. Hierarchies were being leveled out. The silenced were getting a voice. It was like the democratization of justice."

He may have started this project with that feeling, I don't think he believed this at the end.

One famous (infamous) example of modern day public shaming was the story of Justine Sacco - a woman who had made a VERY ill-thought out tweet at the beginning of a plane flight to Africa - and whose life was ruined by the time she landed. (To confirm how long public shaming can stay with you - I just typed "Justine S" into a search engine - her name was the first result and this happened in 2013.) As Ronson researches her story, and more importantly, meets and talks to Justine, the far reaching implications of a mistaken action that took only seconds to take, becomes very clear to him.

"A life had been ruined. What was it for: just some social media drama? I think our natural disposition as humans is to plod along until we get old and stop. But with social media, we've created a stage for constant artificial high drama. Every day a new person emerges as a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. It's all very sweeping, and not the way we actually are as people. What rush was overpowering us at times like this? What were we getting out of it?"

While most of what Ronson examines is what the shaming does to the shamee - but also - what it says about those who participate. I don't remember him using the term "mob mentality" - but that phenomenon is the underlying message of these case studies.

The portion of the book that had the greatest impact on me was Ronson's conversations and dealing with judge Ted Poe. (I, and maybe others know of him without knowing him - the judge that imposes sentences on people like standing on street corners holding signs about their crimes. What I knew of him made me think he was cruel and something like a "hanging judge". WOW did I have a different opnion after reading this part of the book and what we has to say about the people he dealt with.

And I think (feel) the same thing happened to Ronson. As he speaking with Judge Poe, "Social media shamings are worse than your shamings," I suddenly said to Ted Poe. He looked taken aback. "They are worse," he replied. "They're anonymous." "Or even if they're not anonymous, it's such a pile-on they may as well be." "They're brutal," he said.

I almost hated to put this book down - but in the week since I did so, I've thought about it many, many times - and have mentioned and discussed it with most of my friends and family. This one will stick with me for a LONG time.

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LibraryThing member RidgewayGirl

"With my group," Starlee told me, "the first man said that his secret was that he hadn't paid taxes in ten years. Everyone nodded and looked disappointed that his secret wasn't so sensational. Then the next man said that his secret was he had once murdered a man. He was in a truck with a man and he

punched him in his head and threw him out the guy was dead and another car ran him over. And he didn't go to jail and he never told anyone."

"What did Brad Blanton say?" I asked her.

"He said, 'Next. Great.' So then it got to the next woman. She said, 'Oh! My secrets are so boring! I suppose I can talk about how I have sex with my cat.' Then the murderer raised his hand and said, 'Excuse me. I'd like to add that I also have sex with my cat.'"

Jon Ronson is an expert in getting people to talk to him. In this book, he takes on people whose lives have been ruined through a single tasteless joke, or an act of plagiarism that the internet refuses to let them move on from. Ronson is interested in how people recover from their public shaming, but also in the shamers - what triggers the internet to attack someone? How are ordinary people complicit in this? Along the way, he looks at the way shame affects us, how people fight shame and why some people are able to move on from a public scandal, while others remain targets.

Ronson's inspiration for this book was his reaction when his name and photo were used by a twitterbot. He found himself feeling powerless and angry. He got the guys, university lecturers, to agree to an interview and Ronson was gratified by the responses he got when he posted the interview on YouTube and felt victorious when the twitterbot was taken down.

I can see why people who are otherwise reluctant to talk to anyone, let alone a journalist, would speak with Ronson. He really is the least threatening person on earth. This is emphasized when you listen to him, which I have and while reading this book, I heard it narrated in his voice. Here, he talks to a writer whose plagiarism was revealed, and the journalist who unmasked him. He talks to two women who made tasteless jokes, one on twitter and one on Facebook. And he talks to Max Moseley, a wealthy, prominent Brit who was unmasked as a frequenter of a sex club with a Nazi theme. Moseley survived his scandal, and was able to continue on with his life and Ronson wants to find out why he managed to reinvent himself, when so many people whose transgressions were much smaller were still trapped in their houses, unable to move on.

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LibraryThing member arielfl

I had previously read and enjoyed the Psychpath Test by this author. The legacy of that book seems to be that everyone in his new book wants to know if they are a psychopath. Apparently if you are worried that you are one, you are not. In any case the new book focuses on internet shaming. We've

gone from putting people in stocks in Puritian New England to detonating their lives via Twitter on the internet. Ronson provides several examples of people who are their own worst enemies. A flippant comment, sloppy journalism, or an off the cuff photo which might have gone unnoticed in the past, now gets blown up to epic proporions. Anyone who has access to a computer can now act as judge and jury. Ronson does some side track exploration of sex and jusdicial shaming but the most fascinating parts of the book are the stories of the individuals who through an unthinking moment opened themselves up to public scorn that costs them their jobs and any semblance of a normal life. This is a cautionary tale for anyone living in the internet age.

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LibraryThing member JonArnold

Social media’s great strength and downfall is that it allows instant conversations about subjects; providing a modern, immaterial hub that used to be filled by pubs, phone-ins and telephone conversations. We don’t need to see anyone’s face anymore; just an avatar which might look like them or

might not. The babble of instant reaction is everything, the fuel which powers our interaction.

The upside of this, of course, is that we’re all connected and in touch, that we can share the things we love. The dark side is those things, those moments which a large group decides are beyond the pale. For what may be a calculated move, something that’s been gotten away with for years, a moment of madness or simply poor wording people are stigmatised by their actions. And with social media holding records shame is something that’s harder to lose than ever before. You can’t run off to another town, it’s there on the internet for a digital eternity; certainly long enough to make your life a permanent misery. Ronson’s latest book takes as its subject those who’ve been on the receiving end of these internet shamings; who may justifiably find that the whole world’s against them for a while. They range from authors caught plagiarising, through tabloid outrage fodder and all the way to foolish Twitter and Facebook users. Ronson hunts down the human beings at the heart of these outrages and hears the context of their brief infamy and the consequences of it. Some deal with it well, some don’t deal with it at all, but what really shines is Ronson’s compassion for the people caught in what’s essentially digital mob justice. It’s quietly horrifying that daft actions can have consequences out of proportion with the perceived offence, but then in a fast-moving interconnected social world people will encounter things which will offend them and react with little thought. So You Think You’ve Been Publicly Shames acts as a warning to think before you tweet or make a condemnatory comment. One of those rare books that might actually help those who’ve read it make the world a slightly better place.

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LibraryThing member bragan

The internet -- and especially Twitter -- has become a place where it's common for people to point out and heap scorn on those whose words or actions they disapprove of or find offensive. This can be a positive thing: a way to call out behavior or attitudes that deserve to be challenged, by means

of a platform that gives a voice to the traditionally voiceless. On the other hand, it can also create the internet equivalent of a pitchfork-weilding mob, a court-of-popular-opinion conviction without trial whose consequences in the lives of its targets can be ruinous out of all proportion to the offense. And that second thing seems to be growing more and more common.

Jon Ronson looks at a number of different aspects of this modern wave of public shaming: how it happens, why it happens, what the effects can be, and just what shame is and why it has such power over us. He does this with his usual mix of personal musings, participatory journalism, and letting his interviewees speak for themselves. Said interviewees range from people who we can probably all agree are guilty of some level of real transgression -- notably journalistic falsifiers Jonah Lehrer and Mike Daisey -- to people whose crime consists entirely of making a stupid, ill-advised joke they expected few people to see and no one to take seriously.

Sometimes the stories Ronson has to tell are funny. Sometimes they're heartbreaking. In the end, the book seems to act as a low-key call for an end to, or at least a step back from, this kind of public shaming. Ronson himself says that while he once was a gleeful jumper-on of public shaming bandwagons and still feels the attraction, he now makes the conscious decision to refrain, and it seems pretty clear that he'd prefer to see the world in general take a more humane approach to such things. Personally, I agree: engaging people in a resonable human-being-to-human-being dialog about what bothers you seems to me both more moral and more useful than jumping onto a bloodthirsty public-shaming dogpile, at least in most cases. (Obvious trolls and anyone threatening violence are, it must be said, a whole different kettle of fish.) But it's also way, way more difficult, and usually much less satisfying, than venting forth 140 characters of righteous indignation. So I really don't think I can see it changing. And, much as I love so much about the internet, contemplating this stuff has kind of made me want to go dig an internet-free hole and hide there until the world somehow miracuously attains that Star Trek future where everybody gets along.

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LibraryThing member akblanchard

Journalist Jon Ronson takes readers on a whirlwind tour of the frightening, confusing world of public shame.

Stocks and pillories may have gone out of style, but social media (Twitter in particular) have given the rabble an effective new way to indulge their righteous indignation by piling on those

who say or do the wrong thing. Ronson recounts a number of high-profile examples, including the Jonah Lehrer quote-fabrication scandal and the outcry that followed PR executive Justine Sacco's single ill-advised tweet regarding AIDS, and concludes that the relentless barrage of online shaming is often out of proportion to the social "crime" itself. Lives are destroyed, and since, as Ronson writes, "the internet never forgets", the damage can be very hard to repair. Ronson even takes readers behind the scenes at Reputation.com, a company that specializes in restoring damaged reputations through search engine optimization (SEO), or, in other words, through gaming Google.

This book is somewhat padded with digressions (such as a discussion of the public humiliation genre of pornography) that don't really support the author's main thesis. However, Ronson does succeed in reminding readers of an important point: even though manufactured outrage is the Twitterverse's favorite form of entertainment, transgressors are people, too.

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LibraryThing member michellebarton

Jon Ronson's latest is primarily about how social media, especially Twitter, is being used to publicly shame those we find fault with, whether this shame is justly deserved or not. He weighs the benefit of having these tools at our disposal, giving the average person a bigger voice and more power

than ever before, against the complete devastation that can be unleashed for what might be only a moment of poor judgment. Just as he does in his previous books, he explores in depth specific cases of very public shaming, how it was brought about, what the aftereffects are and how long they can linger. I admire how he can look at many sides of an issue and how he combines reporting on his research with his own personal experiences.

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LibraryThing member jillrhudy

Ronson has written a book about the resurgence of public shaming in the Internet age. As a member of Generation X, I was struck by the youth of both the shamers and the shamed whose anecdotes appear in this book. Kids, destroying other kids (perhaps permanently, given the long memory of the

internet) with a weapon they both understand better than anyone and don't really understand at all, in a kind of terrifying mob mentality which Ronson investigates at length. Kids, just being kids, and not thinking through all the possible internet ramifications of their actions for their careers and families or the careers and families of others. In at least one instance, a bunch of (again, too young to have even reached full brain development) 4chan trolls turn around and destroy one of the shamers on behalf of the shamed. The internet in these hands is like a baby with a blow torch, and yet it's largely their internet.

Except that it isn't. The Net is not a bastion of free speech and a playground for the moral voice of Millennials and teenagers, its the internet of profit run and funded by much older people, that has nothing to do with justice and fairness and everything to do with advertising dollars. Ronson points this out too, and puts a dollar value of over $100,000 going into Google's coffers for one life destroyed (a PR professional pilloried by more than a million "searches" and who knows how many tweets in just 24 hours for tweeting a joke perceived as racist).

Ronson also deftly points out that the internet poses as a place where the young can freely share their own thoughts and goofy actions with their own friends, but if you share the wrong thing at the wrong time and it gets into the wrong hands, you can become a bad Google result forever. Hence, the advent of companies that can rehabilitate your wrecked internet image by filling Google with better stuff about you.

The weakness of the book is that it doesn't have much of a structure. Ronson just explores and free-associates ideas and anecdotes about shaming throughout. With a title called "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" you would expect a guidebook on how to deal with internet pillorying, but this is more of an exploration of ideas that may, or may not, provide some insight/caution for those who have been involved in piling humiliation and blame on the person whom the Internet is pillorying (for there is always someone in the pillory) or have been that someone whose 15 minutes of fame is the beginning of 15 days of shame with a life in ruins afterward, deservedly or not.

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LibraryThing member Meggo

The concept of public shaming is not a new one, nor is it unique to North America. But the internet has revived and amplified this age-old phenomenon to levels previously unseen. I wish Ronson had gone deeper with his analysis, but his survey of several recent victims/perpetrators of public shaming

is interesting nonetheless.

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LibraryThing member les121

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is not quite like Jon Ronson’s other books. In comparison to psychopaths, conspiracy theorists, and military psychic experiments, public shaming is a much more commonplace subject. Even so, Ronson manages to find the most extreme cases of public shaming

imaginable, including a bizarre foray into the world of pornography.

In spite of the pornography detour, I think this is Ronson’s most serious book to date. Although his trademark humor is still there, Ronson picks apart the profound role of shame in our culture and indicts social media in particular as a powerful platform for shaming non-conformists.

Regardless of whether you agree with Ronson's assertions or not, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is a thought provoking examination of what shame does to both the shamed person and the person who does the shaming. I hope that everyone who reads it will come away from it, like I did, with a desire to foster more compassion in our online communities and our society at large.

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LibraryThing member mstrust

Ronson looks at the very modern way the world shames and punishes people it deems guilty, often by attacking them anonymously on social media. He takes specific cases, such as that of plagiarist author Jonah Lehrer or Tweeter Justine Sacco, who wrote a badly worded joke and as a result, lost her

job, received death threats and has been labeled a racist by the internet. Ronson meets with the people concerned, some of whom are still so damaged that they rarely leave home, and even speaks to the exact person who began the shaming of particular people. He also meets with a secret internet company that repairs reputations through search engines, attends a week-end seminar to learn how to get rid of shame (which begins with the attendees admitting to horrifying behavior and devolves to Ronson being screamed at and cussed out by the instructor and multiple students), witnesses the filming of "public disgrace" porn, and meets with people who came out of public scandals strangely unscathed.

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LibraryThing member villemezbrown

A very readable book, especially during the early chapters, but it loses focus after the midpoint as Ronson starts to free associate connections and casts his net wider for more fodder. Paradoxically, the best parts of the book are the ones where he recounts someone's shame and my schadenfreude

kicks in. So is he addressing the trend toward public shaming or cashing in on it? Alas, Ronson fails to really bring the whole thing to any meaningful conclusion which tips the seesaw toward exploitation.

I hope the shamed people he names can take some comfort from the fact that I had either had not heard of them at all or had nearly completely forgotten their moment in the spotlight. Time and the fleeting attention of your fellow man are probably the best cures for any outward shame. Inner shame is probably a harder demon to shake.

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LibraryThing member csmith0406

While a quick light read, still provided some food for thought on the nature of social media and human behaviour.

LibraryThing member Petroglyph

This book deals with online shaming and the psychological effect it has on its targets. Ronson interviews a few people who were infamously pilloried on Twitter and, while interesting, this book does read like a book-length treatment of the wikipedia article on online shaming, which is really too

long. Ronson initially supports twitter shaming as a grass-roots, voice-of-the-common-people way of calling out misbehaving billionaires, only to come around when considering the outsize and life-ruining effects that a single tweet may cause an online hate-mob to hand out. So this book is interesting and slight at the same time, and it also overstays its welcome a little.

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LibraryThing member Kaethe

Not interested in seeing Ronson treat all his cases as equal, especially the experiences of Adria Richards and Lindsay Armstrong, women who didn't do anything wrong.

LibraryThing member Codonnelly

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” may very well be the lie of the century. So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson examines the history of public shaming and how a social media obsessed society has popularized it once again. Ronson interviews a select

group of people who were publicly shamed on the Internet over the past decade. His observations shed new light on how harmful anonymous insults and threats can be, and how mere words can lead to nightmarish consequences.

Reality is often more terrifying than fiction. Ronson’s investigations hit very close to home, as most people have posted something controversial on the Internet at least once. His interviewees were average people with ordinary lives, until infamy was thrust upon them. Social media snafus spread quickly and effectively. Most readers will remember these people, not by their given names, but by the personas that their slanderers created for them. Their mistakes are publicized, and even worse, archived forever.

Ronson analyzes public shaming from a few relevant angles: why do we do it, how does it affect the victim, and how does one recover from shame? He takes an incredibly personal approach to the study, and in doing so allows the reader to make his or her own judgments too. Most striking of all is Ronson’s persistence. He is never afraid to ask difficult questions, which dredges up some surprising and astute responses to his questions and experimentations.

Unlike a novel, the ending can not be satisfying, per se, because there is no easy answer to steering clear of public shaming. The only obvious solution is to not participate on social media platforms, but even Ronson dismisses this as impractical in this day and age. His research will open your eyes to the unpredictable nature of social media users, as well as the disturbing truth that a public shaming could very easily happen to anyone you know and love, including yourself.

The Internet is a marvelous invention that has brought people together, but it has also torn people apart. Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed fiercely exposes the dark side of human connection on the Internet. While reading it, you will definitely think twice about posting anything that can be misconstrued on an online platform, and you may also have a few nightmares in the process.

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LibraryThing member PhilipJHunt

Don't often give 5 stars, unless it's Hilary Mantel. Ronson is not in those literarti heights, but this isuch a readable and RELEVANT book. Social media has unleashed freedom and irresponsibility in equal measure. And many of us need to find a balance. Scapegoating others in order to luxuriate in

transitory power is making us into bullies at no moral cost at all. The human cost of this carelessness is significant. Being right is no excuse for hatefulness.

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LibraryThing member bness2

This is an excellent book on a topic that should be of interest to anyone who uses the Internet regularly, especially social networks. Ronson essentially focuses on the phenomena of social shaming using the Internet and discovers as he digs more deeply into the topic how disturbing and damaging it

can be, even to people that are not actually guilty of anything more than a stupid joke, and off-hand remark or a questionable picture.

Much of the book focuses on two prominent cases of shaming, Jonah Lehrer and Justine Sacco. Lehrer was a prominent pop-sci author who basically made up some of the material in a book he wrote about Bob Dylan, and once exposed, was shamed so thoroughly he was not able to get published anymore. Justine Sacco was the woman who posted “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” on Twitter, just before flying to South Africa. By the time she got off the plane a full-blown shaming, via Twitter was underway, and she received literally 100s of thousands of nasty comments and threats aimed at her.

Ronson ranges over many other aspects of public shaming, including looking at the history of it in early America (it was banned by the middle of the 19th century because i was seen as too harsh a punishment). He also fully explores the reasons shaming occurs, and why some people apparently survive it without a lot of trauma, whereas others are devastated, sometimes for years after.

Some of the stories related in the book sound like the stuff of nightmares, and it certainly helps one think twice before participating in public shamings.

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LibraryThing member meandmybooks

I really enjoyed Ronson's book on psychopaths, but this is even better! Well, I found it more interesting, anyway – one hopes never to be in proximity to a psychopath, but public shaming is something that anyone who spends much time on the internet these days is likely to witness and consider.

“So You've Been Publicly Shamed” was published in 2015 and, after opening with the story of the hijacking of his own name by a group of academics with a spambot, Ronson begins with the story of the exposure of Jonah Lehrer for making up quotes. I remember that story well and, in fact, still haven't gotten around the reading “How We Decide,” which I bought but hadn't yet read when the “creative journalism” story broke. After Lehrer he visits Justine Sacco, the woman who tweeted about how she was visiting Africa but didn't have to worry about AIDS because she was white. As he moves on through various incidents, not all of which began on the internet but which generally escalated thanks to our new ability to instantly join in at the kill, adding our own words of disapprobation for the enlightenment of wrongdoers, Ronson meets a variety of victims of public shaming, some of whom certainly deserved some criticism for their misdeeds, but few who deserved the comprehensive destruction that was visited upon them. He also interviews people with other perspectives on the public shaming phenomenon: a woman with the online forum 4chan, which coordinates online attacks; a judge who hands out shaming sentences; a professional “fixer” of damaged reputations through Google manipulation; a psychotherapist who teaches a course in shame “eradication”; a porn film director working to make people with certain interests feel less “freakish and alone”; an ex-governor of New Jersey running a therapeutic prison unit for women, etc. Ronson explores why internet attacks can feel so invigorating to participants, how being subject to sudden, worldwide criticism, whether for a serious lapse in judgment or a bad joke, can carry a lifetime of consequences, and why some subjects of shaming attacks survive with nary a scratch and others suffer years of unemployment, fear, and loneliness, or are driven to suicide. Finally, he considers the “winners” of shaming (Google, despite their “Don't be evil” motto, profits greatly from internet frenzies) and how our society may be being impacted by the fact that minor transgressions can, for some unlucky souls, be blown out of proportion in a place where records never die and shame is everlasting. Ronson takes his subject seriously, but explores it in a way that I found very entertaining, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, and, occasionally, really heartbreaking. An excellent, thought provoking book.

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LibraryThing member aront

I would actually give this a 4-. It’s well written engrossing and definitely an empathetic portrayal of social media lynching victims. But Ronson sometimes gets too involved in the story & there seems to be a lot of filler about how he went about writing the book. Both of these seems a bit lazy

way for him to fill up the book. Surely there is a lot more social science, philosophy & literature than can shed light on the ugliness of human nature that leads to such awful mob behaviors?

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LibraryThing member Carmenere

As the title implies, this book is all about shamings. This book details 15 examples of people being called out, some by their own undoing, some because it's their job, others who actually enjoy it. The internet, via social media, has created a whole new sport of public shamings, some of which are

warranted, some not, some caused by a person's insensitivity, some caused by those too sensitive, sometimes even sheer stupidity and laziness, regardless of which it is all on public display and a new form of citizen justice has been created. In a time of fact checking and viral comments, words are every-bodies business.
Very good book which would make for great book group discussions. Highly recommend it

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LibraryThing member shulera1

TL;DR Synopsis: Through social media, public shaming has come back in a way that hasn't been seen since Ye Olden Days(TM) and it's having a profound effect on the recipients.

TL;DR Review: I liked it, but not as much as I would have if I used Twitter more.

I picked up a copy of So You've Been

Publicly Shamed after listening to the author, Jon Ronson, on an episode of the Nerdist podcast. He was a treat to listen to and I found his points interesting, so I figured, why not pick up the book?

I liked SYBPS, but felt as if I was the wrong audience the entire time I was reading. I'm not very involved on social media, especially not Twitter, so I didn't really find myself identifying with the people he was talking about. To be totally honest, I've never even seen any of the shaming he's talking about. I know it's there, but my feed is so tame, I've never experienced any of the shaming he speaks of, even as an observer.

That being said, SYBPS is a good read, and if you're interested in social media and modern communications, you'll probably enjoy it. It's well-written and goes by very quickly due to its blend of interviews and personal anecdotes.

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LibraryThing member SamMusher

Page-turner but pretty lightweight. He drags Malcolm Gladwell but is Gladwellian in his anecdotal, oversimplified style. It's fun, though, and I appreciate his compassionate standpoint.

LibraryThing member andycyca

Let me just say that if I were in charge of designing any kind of middle /higher education curriculum, I'd suggest this book as compulsory reading. It's a lot about shame, but also about how and why it might be used as a tool, as a weapon, as punishment. It's about how *we* behave before something

*we* don't like our approve. It's about how we see ourselves and others, and how social media has marked a before and after in that regard. Seriously, go read it. Fully digest it. I'm sure we all can find something of value here.

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